Marketing Turnaround.

I used to hate online advertising. I blame it on the so called Web 1.0. In the earlier days of the internet. I didn't mind the occasional ad splashed onto a web page here and there, they started of plainly with a nice and quiet static advertising space. But as soon as someone found and used the blink tag, things definitely came to grow ugly. Add to that if you will, a scrolling marquee and a host of flashing and annoying fit inducing animated gifs not to mention absolutely horrid abuses of gaudy fonts and colours then you have what I remember online advertising Web 1.0 style to be.

As the face of online marketing began to change the bigger companies seem to realise that there was actual revenue to be gained by allowing part of their marketing division to investigate the possibilities of actually making a return on this new form of media. The bigger companies quickly seemed to realise that hideously annoying flashy-blinky-bleeping things were not the way to go.

Everything was going good for a while..... and then along came flash. Awesome a new way to deliver flashy-blinky-bleeping things that can contain a longer more repetitive message and that can also implement real time human interaction. I don't have a problem with flash mind you, I have a problem with the trend that it brought with it. Flash based sites, bandwidth boggers (yes by the way, I am making some of these terms up as I go...) all started appearing. Who really wants to sit around waiting for something to render on a page only to be greeted with a shitty flash ad that bears little resemblance to the site theme (content or appearance wise).

And then came the spam, spyware, malware, badware etc. In my opinion all of these problems rose because of the sheer value and profit that could be attained from using the internet as an advertising platform. From that first bit of spam that hit usenet to companies doing shady deals with spam creators and software developers, these are the reasons I detested online advertising. For further detestation (yeah that's my word.... leave it alone) companies started tracking users all over the net with data mining and recording user habits.

When all of this began there weren't any of the current privacy laws or safe guards in place. This led to some of the more questionable marketing entrepreneurs capitalising on this and they started trading personal information as a commodity amongst partners or to the highest bidder. What concerned me is what did the companies actually do with all of this information? Why would want them to have my information to trade with other parties that I haven't even heard of let alone read their privacy policy? I kept hearing cries of targeted marketing but I can't say that I once ever saw it implemented well without it turning into spam or off the mark affiliate adverts. But hey, what I consider spam you could very well called thoughtfully placed advertising and vice versa no doubt.

So that brings me to current day. There was a fair gap I just brushed off then but there is not much to be said other than there was more of the same. It is now in this so called Web 2.0, that things seemed to have worked themselves out. We now have an emphasis on privacy policies, end user license agreements, terms of service agreements, terms of service etc. Unfortunately though It must be said that there is only a small percentage of users that actually endeavor to read them. All of these binding and non-binding agreements together with a legal system that has had to think on its feet while this still young form of media evolves has resulted in a remarkable turnaround in the quality and content of online marketing.

One of the main defining turns it seems for online marketing was the increasing popularity of social networks. Ads on social networks seem to scale fairly well and most of them aren't annoying or distracting. While the spam level has not subsided it has become somewhat manageable (just). But the actual on site advertising has become refined, defined and well targeted. I no longer mind opening a page up and seeing a few ads unobtrusively placed about the page. I no longer want to pull my eyes out with a fork because the page is full of flashy-blinky-bleeping things. It seems that online advertising has caught up, nice to see. I even take adblock plus off half the time now, yay for me.